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Friday, 8 June 2018

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain commits suicide at 61

The celebrated chef and television personality, Anthony Bourdain, was found dead in Frace after a reported suicide. He was 61.

For celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, food was life. Travel was life. Rock and roll was life.

On Friday, his life ended suddenly in a suicide that stunned friends and millions of fans around the world.

Bourdain, 61, hanged himself inside his room at a luxury French hotel, where best friend and fellow chef Eric Ripert discovered his body Friday morning.

The best-selling author, raconteur and globetrotting TV epicure took his own life while visiting the region of Haut-Rhin in Alsace for his Peabody Award-winning CNN series “Parts Unknown.”

No other details were made public, but close friend Andrew Zimmern said there were no indicators of impending self-destruction from Bourdain.

“A piece of my heart is truly broken this morning,” Zimmern said. “And the irony, the sad cruel irony is that the last year he’d never been happier.

“Tony was a symphony,” continued Zimmern, who wore a pair of his old pal’s boots Friday to honor Bourdain. “I wish everyone could have seen all of him.”

His mother Gladys Bourdain, a former New York Times editor, told the newspaper her son showed no signs of depression or suicidal tendencies.

“He is absolutely the last person in the world I would have ever dreamed would do something like this,” she said.

Celebrated chef, author and television host Anthony Bourdain was found dead by suicide in France on June 8, 2018. Bourdain, who was 61, was shooting an episode of his award-winning show “Parts Unknown.” Here, he poses in a New York restaurant on Aug. 8, 2007. (Mary Altaffer/AP)

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Bourdain’s final hours were spent in the old world Le Chambard hotel about 300 miles east of Paris. Suites at the posh getaway rent for $350 a night, offering a view of the local vineyards.

Ripert, in a statement to the Daily News, said nothing about finding his friend’s body — with the French chef focusing on Bourdain’s life, rather than his death.

“Anthony was a dear friend,” he said. “He was an exceptional human being, so inspiring and generous. One of the great storytellers of our time who connected with so many. I wish him peace.”

The New York City native was a writer of mystery novels and lover of dive bars who toiled in anonymity for years, logging long hours for low pay before finding a success that stretched across two decades.

“I jokingly say that I learned every important lesson, all the important lessons of my life, as a dishwasher,” he said during an NPR interview.

He burst into prominence with his 2000 best-seller “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.”

The book — part memoir, part industry exposé — catapulted Bourdain into the world of celebrity chefs and cable television while selling more than 1 million copies.

“The Elvis of bad boy chefs,” proclaimed The Smithsonian.

The book again rocketed to the No.1 spot on Amazon’s best-sellers in the hours after his death.

His meteoric rise eventually led to Bourdain sharing bun cha with former President Barack Obama in Hanoi two years ago. He was glib and outspoken and unapologetic, making the move into television without a hitch.

Bourdain, before CNN, hosted the Emmy-winning “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations” on the Travel Channel. The CNN show earned an Emmy in 2015.

“He taught us about food — but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together,” Obama said Friday. “To make us a little less afraid of the unknown. We’ll miss him.”

Bourdain long maintained that he never expected the runaway success of “Kitchen Confidential” and all that ensued.

“What I set out to do was write a book that my fellow cooks would find entertaining and true,” he said. “I wanted it to sound like me talking at say ... 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, after a busy dinner rush, me and a few cooks hanging around in the kitchen, knocking back a few beers and talking s---.”

Anthony Bourdain was found dead, June 8, 2018. He was 61. (James Keivom / New York Daily News)

The brutally frank Bourdain, a lover of ’70s punk bands like The Stooges and The Ramones, was also a guest judge on Bravo’s “Top Chef” and a judge on “Top Chef All-Stars.”

Bourdain, who dated actress and Harvey Weinstein accuser Asia Argento for the last year, became an outspoken supporter of the #MeToo movement.

His suicide came just three days after fashion designer Kate Spade hanged herself in her Manhattan apartment.

On his acclaimed CNN series, Bourdain spent the last five years traveling the world with an uncomplicated agenda.

“We ask very simple questions: What makes you happy? What do you eat? What do you like to cook?” Bourdain said while accepting the Peabody Award.

“And everywhere in the world we go and ask these very simple questions, we tend to get some really astonishing answers.”

Bourdain was born on June 25, 1956, in New York City, and raised across the Hudson River in Leonia, N.J. His lifelong love of food began when Bourdain ate his first oyster during a family vacation to France.

He attended Vassar College in New York for two years, with drug use leading him to drop out, before graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1978.